Normally, I concentrate on either Roman antiquity, or nineteenth century history, but I’ve been down a World War 2 rabbit hole with this one.

When we were in Italy last year, we stayed for part of the time in a tiny medieval borgo on the edge of the Appenines overlooking the vineyards of rural Tuscany.

The area was crisscrossed with walking tracks making it relatively easy to walk up the hill away from the agricultural area to the heavily wooded hilltops – a different, more primeval Tuscany, littered with Etruscan tombs and abandoned farmsteads, as well as the occasional remains of bunkers left over from the Second World War.

If you have read Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Appennines, and wondered how easy it would be for escapee to hide out on isolated farms, a muddy morning looking for Etruscan tombs is enough to convince you that it would not be as difficult as you might think to hide out in the forest especially with some help from the partisans, as Newby had.

During the Second World War, after Italy’s surrender to the Allies, the Germans, supported by Italian forces still loyal to Mussolini, fought a vicious guerilla war across these hills against a mixture of Allied forces, partisans, and those parts of the Italian army loyal to the new pro allied government.

For the Italians, it was in effect a civil war between pro and anti Fascist forces, as well as being part of a much larger conflict. And the ruined bunkers ? These were usually built by the Germans as strong points overlooking strategic roads and passes in the hope of hindering the Allied advance.

Both sides carried out extrajudicial executions of suspected traitors and collaborators, as well as acts of mass murder against innocent peasants, and the killing of prisoners captured during firefights in the mountains.

As I have said it was a vicious, brutal war.

Anyway, I was looking for information on the location of Roman and Etruscan sites, and I stumbled across a site documenting left over World War Two bunkers and emplacements, when I came across a confronting image of what purported to be execution a young woman by German soldiers.

The young woman was naked, but there was something about the image that did not seem quite right. She seemed relatively relaxed and showed no signs of physical or sexual violence as might have been expected, and the quality of the image was less grainy than the images of the surrounding soldiers.

So, as an experiment, I grabbed a screenshot of the image and pasted it into Google Lens (I had previously used Lens to track the provenance of an image with some success), expecting that it would come up with some World War 2 photographic archive sites.

It didn’t. It came up with a list of American pornography websites.

Not what I expected, but as a number of these sites routinely scrape the web looking for content, perhaps not unexpected given the subject matter.

Lens searches initially only give you the top ten or so results by default but clicking on the ‘more results’ button I also got links to a number of Russian language sites, one of which had quite a detailed technical analysis of the image (and also of some other equally confronting images).

These days, while I can still read simple Russian, I’m badly out of practice and have to resort to Google Translate for more complex texts, so Google Translate it was

That said, the upshot of the article was that Stalin’s NKVD, who employed some excellent photographic manipulators, appear to have produced a number of manipulated images to illustrate German atrocities on the Eastern front, and that these images made their way into a number of Soviet era histories as if they were the truth.

I’ll add a caveat here, the Russian language site that contained the detailed analyses had an agenda about the systematic use of image manipulation by the Soviet authorities during World War 2 to exaggerate the brutality of the German forces on the Eastern Front.

However, having read the quite careful analyses, I’m convinced that whatever the agenda of the website concerned, the image under discussion has been manipulated for propaganda purposes and that it has been perpetuated as a true record of an extrajudicial killing.

After all, the camera never lies, does it?